


twenty-one

by Elendraug



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series)
Genre: 21 Sacraments Ending (Silent Hill), Drabble Collection, Game: Silent Hill 4 The Room, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 14:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28780023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: before they were sacraments.
Kudos: 7
Collections: Genuary 2021





	1. 15121

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinneas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinneas/gifts), [machinavellian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/machinavellian/gifts).



> with such ongoing isolation, and the month/year format for this january, it felt right to revisit this
> 
> dedicated to my pals who have loved SH4 alongside me since it was released ♥ I love you guys

Joseph adjusts the lamp, illuminates his workspace, begins typing: _Teaching Despair._ With deliberate taps of his fingertips he writes a record of their suffering, commits these misdeeds to print and calls for some semblance of justice, whether for harm long since inflicted, ongoing atrocities, or both.

He turns the platen knob and rolls the final page of the first draft out to free it from the machine. He places it on his desk beneath the others, and jogs the paper into a neat pile.

Joseph pushes his chair back and stretches his wrists; when he’s focused, sometimes it seems like he’ll fuse with the furniture. 

There’s time enough left tonight to relax with a record.


	2. 16121

Cynthia waits at the platform, drums her fingers against her arm, resists the temptation to check the timetable again. Instead she feels for the shape of her commuter card through the thin fabric of her windbreaker, and takes a small measure of comfort in assuring herself it’s not fallen out of place from her pocket.

The train arrives in a rush, mostly on time, and she boards the car with careful steps, practiced enough not to take sure footing for granted even in everyday office heels.

Once she’s found a suitable seat, she tucks her bag between her thigh and the wall, runs a cord out from an unzipped gap, and hooks her earphones over her right ear only. The disc whirs audibly just before the music kicks in.

She watches the window on her way to work, still alert on her left side, restless.


	3. 17121

Jasper stubs out his cigarette against the crumbling pavement of the parking lot, driving his low top shoe into ash and asphalt, and returns to the interior of the car he’s had since high school. It’s still running, somehow, just like he is, and its engine block feels like it’s on borrowed time, too.

He reaches over to retrieve a memo pad from the passenger seat, long since empty of anything but assorted trash and scraps of notes, and adds a hastily scrawled reminder to himself, appended to an already lengthy to-do list.

There are numerous affairs to arrange prior to returning to the source of all his trauma, worse off for the devil he never got to know as intimately as his ill-fated friends. But it’s been years and everything he’s read, about the town and his troubles alike, has him steadfastly readied to face his fears; better late than never.

He recaps the pen and clips it to the paper, then grabs his Gatorade from some previous gas station and chugs the rest, setting the emptied plastic back in the cupholder.

Jasper wipes condensation onto his jeans and prepares to drive once more.


	4. 18121

Andrew tilts back his flask and taps the last drops of vodka from it; he can’t trust the water here, anyway, and its smell is indistinct on his breath. The Order overlooks a lot of things so long as the job gets done, and to do the job takes something to take the edge off what it entails, for him to overlook a lot of things in turn.

The flask may well be the only sterile object for miles, disinfected by serving its very purpose, a built-in cleansing ritual. It’s a habit that’s harder to hide when he’s at the location out in the woods, but here within these rotating walls, there’s no one watching the watcher.

He doesn’t have to like what he does, as long as it pays the bills. For every crumbling section of structure in this panopticon, he’s got one to match it back at his place, and repairs don’t fix themselves. Not with water damage, not with mold, not with vermin working their way into the very foundations of his home. It takes infinite effort to edge out erosion, to halt the slide of entropy and kick that can just a bit longer, to hold out and stall the encroaching rot, but he can do this.

No one likes their work, or it wouldn’t be work. Everyone’s had to cut corners somewhere. Someone’s gotta watch these kids.

When it’s all done, when it’s all over with, then he’ll quit. That’s what he tells himself.


	5. 19121

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who's my favorite

> _Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It's one thing after another. I've tried to control a chaotic universe. And it's a losing battle. But I can't let go. I've tried, but I can't._
> 
> —Harvey Pekar

* * *

Richard slides his window open halfway to let in a rush of fresh air, adjusting the pressure he applies to accommodate the idiosyncrasies of its tendency to stick despite his ongoing efforts to have it repaired, or else do so himself. With his tea finished steeping, he pours a cup and settles back to rest in the comfort of his favorite chair, itself a familiar presence far longer than most friends he’s known.

Even amidst the roiling chaos this complex has seen over the years, it’s still his home; he’s fiercely protective of it and its inhabitants, even if the superintendent could stand to do better on occasion, even if the incidental tenant makes six months or a year insufferable in bits and pieces.

He knows this place, the sounds in its walls, so much of its history after half a lifetime lived walking through these halls. He knows the people, their names and faces as well as Sunderland, their mistakes and maladaptations moreso, whether they like it or not. Across two decades he’s kept a finger on the pulsating ambiance of South Ashfield Heights, in Frank’s blind spots; someone needs to be able to distinguish between love letters and love bombing, between a non-firing replica and a converted model, between PBR and phthalo blue. All the local haunts are as familiar as the back of his hand: the bar, the stores, the subway stops and tourist traps, the iffy food to avoid and the holes-in-the-wall worth giving anything for.

Richard tracks and treasures interpersonal details too easily deemed insignificant to a historical society but imperative for an intertwined community, as much as any one person can hope to hold onto the history of a place, here the longest aside from Frank, the many anyday moments lost to the time aside from his own memories.

At times he’s felt as though he’s the last line of defense between this building and utter ruin, for reasons he can’t quite admit enough to articulate without skirting too close to arrogance. There’s been all manner of human drama below and beside him, in moving boxes, in odd keepsakes, in torn paper and unwanted correspondence. He’s outlasted living next to nine noisy children (plus an extra one, perpetually displaced), an alcoholic always seeking confrontation, and a pushy creep every other resident wanted out. So why move now?

He likes it here. It’s where he wants to spend his days, busy with his own interests, sleeping alone in the quiet that comes with a sense of minimalism, with few photographs to dust and the white noise of talk radio blurring into distanced conversation amongst the occupants. There’s peace in the patterned structure of diamond wallpaper he applied and checkered flooring he’s maintained as if 207 were truly his, in the wind rustling the limbs of trees he’s watched grow in expanding fractals, reaching for the skyline intersection of city and cloud cover.

Richard smiles, sips his tea, and follows the path of rising steam, dissipating right as it’s become visible from contact with the late afternoon chill.

He just wants to be home.


	6. 20121

come on eileen


	7. 21121

henry ilu I'm sorry I'm slow


End file.
